The Book that had Never Been Read

by Unwhole Hole


Chapter 10

Due to the influence of the book, Dinky’s physical condition had deteriorated significantly. The extent was so bad that she really did end up in the hospital, under the care of doctors who actually did have medical degrees. She eventually regained consciousness, although in the incomplete state of her mind it felt as though she were being dragged through thick, stinking mud and rigid grass onto mildly dryer land.
Recovering in the hospital took some time, though. Derpy was there as much as she could be, and even during some times when she technically was not allowed to. Silver Spoon came by more than once, visiting both Diamond Tiara- -who was rapidly repressing the memories of her ordeal and beginning to recover herself- -and Dinky. She even brought flowers one time, and like always, Dinky was happy to see her without the controlling influence of Diamond Tiara looming over her shoulder.
Even Starlight Glimmer appeared at one point. Her and Dinky had just stared at each other for a long time, and then Dinky had done her best to explain what had happened. Starlight listened and nodded, but said nothing, although Dinky had the distinct impression that nothing she was saying was unexpected to the elder unicorn, and that from the look in her eyes some of it might even have been familiar.
Starlight had offered to remove the symbols from Dinky’s house and to dispose of them, and Dinky had agreed. She had not, however, told Starlight where the book itself was. It was highly doubtful that Starlight would even attempt to get near it after what had happened, but Dinky refused to take any chances. The book needed to stay intact.

After two weeks, Dinky was ready to leave the hospital and return to school. She was still somewhat weak, but she had regained the weight she had lost and could stand on her own again. The desire to read the book had mostly abated, although she could still feel it nagging at her almost constantly at an annoying but tolerable level.
When she finally did get back to school, though, Dinky found to her great surprise that the due date for her report had been pushed back significantly. In part it was because Diamond Tiara’s own illness had caused Spoiled Rich to put pressure on Cheerilee to move the due date, but largely because the vast majority of the other students simply were not able to read a whole book in three weeks and required at least a month to do so.
The day to present the reports came quickly, though, and Dinky watched the various students present about the books they had read from her seat in the back of the classroom. There was Silver Spoon, presenting a number of philosophical arguments about themes and symbolisms and Old-Equestrian poetic structure concerning the book she had read, as well as a lengthy discourse on whether it could be interpreted as based in true Equestrian history or as a parable produced by the Dawn-Unicorn dynasty. All of it went substantially over the rest of the class’s heads, save for Dinky, who just disagreed with several of Silver’s points. Needless to say, having Silver Spoon go first discouraged the other students greatly.
She was followed by the only student who knew that she had an even better report, which was of course Diamond Tiara. Her hospital stay had left her somewhat thinner than her normal porcine self, but otherwise she had mostly returned to normal save for the fact that she now stayed as far away from Dinky as possible. She read her report- -clearly written in Silver Spoon’s writing voice, complete with a number of words that Diamond Tiara could not pronounce- -from a piece of paper.
The other students followed in succession. Most were not memorable. The only that Dinky took notice of were the presentation belonging to Snips and Snails- -who insisted on doing their presentation together- -which was actually well conceived, if it really only consisted of a two and half hour summery of the exploits of the Great and Powerful Trixie, and of the pair trying to roll their ‘r’s to pronounce Trixie’s name “properly”. The other memorable presentation was from Twist, who had apparently read one of the bridle-rippers that Dinky had consciously avoided. Her descriptions were intense, and by the time a heavily blushing Cheerilee regained enough composure to stop her, every Pegasus in the class had lost control of his or her wings, save for Scootaloo, who was asleep.
Dinky’s presentation was supposed to be last, immediately after an hour-long musical reenactment of “Tales from the Kingdom of Fife” performed by the Cutie Mark Crusaders, complete with costumes. Most of the students had no idea what was going on, but Dinky found it mildly amusing.
Then, finally, Dinky’s turn came.
“And…Dinky,” said Cheerilee. “Do you want to come up and tell us what you read?”
“No,” said Dinky.
Cheerilee blinked, and there was a small but audible collective gasp from the room. “What?” said Cheerilee.
“I don’t have a report,” said Dinky.
“Oh,” said Cheerilee. “Well, considering you were sick, I suppose- -”
“And I don’t intend to do one.”
This time Cheerilee looked even more dumbfounded, if such a thing was even possible. She looked on the verge of tears. “But, Dinky, if you don’t present, you’ll fail the project.”
“I know,” said Dinky. “And I’ve done the math. I’ll still pass.”
“But- -”
“I have nothing to report, Ms. Cheerilee.”
“Oh…okay…” said Cheerilee, marking the line in her grade book for her very best student ever with a large red “F”.
The other students stared at Dinky, equally confused and dumbfounded by her defiance, at least until they realized that it meant that they could go home early. Upon realizing this, they immediately forgot about Dinky entirely and raced out the door, nearly trampling each other in an attempt to reach their daily freedom.
Dinky remained behind, packing up her supplies carefully and walking past the desks to the front of the classroom. Before she turned toward the door, she stopped at Cheerilee’s desk and set down a large page of paper covered in cramped cursive script.
“What is this?” asked Cheerilee.
“My report,” said Dinky.
Cheerilee looked confused. “But you said…”
Dinky did not reply. She instead walked slowly toward the now cleared door. Cheerilee was too perplexed to stop her from leaving, and by the time she came to, Dinky had gone.
Still confused, Cheerilee flipped open the report. It was not long, as she exected, but she could not help but read it right there in the classroom. It appeared as such:



Dinkamena J. Hooves
5/7/1003
Grade 5
SUBJECT: Book Report

For most of my life, I have sought the definitions in things. Facts, methods, history, and the countless subdivisions thereof. Why, then, is it so hard for me to define what this document even is? I would like to think that it is a report—my report—but can it even be called that? Can I even have written a book report without a book? Which is not to say there was no book. Oh, there definitely was—assuming, of course, even that can be defined as such. But even know, I realize how ridiculous this must appear. To report on a book, although I can describe neither its name nor its contents nor the name of the mare who wrote it. I can only conclude, then, that this is hardly a report at all.
I did read the book. Whatever it is named, and whatever content it contains, or did contain, or will contain, I read it. There are no words to describe the beauty I witnessed. Perhaps if I were a painter, I could explain, somehow, but even despite the formats I have already taken with the five-paragraph format I cannot even begin to describe it. Suffice it to say, I love this book. In a literal sense.
Then how strange it must be that I find that the contents are completely irrelevant. What was written within hardly matters at all. I cannot remember it, regardless of how hard I have tried. Which is not to say it has not affected me. No, indeed, quite the opposite has occurred. The things I have seen were not meant for a filly, nor any pony, and in a way I am glad that I shall never recall them.
Yet I continue, altered and different. The world no longer looks to be the peaceful if languid place I once considered it. Nothing is simple anymore. Everything was once clear, but now I understand that the universe has more depth than I could ever conceive. And I am afraid. Afraid of how deep the lake truly goes, and how easy it is for a pony to set hoof within it. I thought everything made sense, that my method would lead to obvious conclusions—but now I doubt even that.
I am not sure I want to study magic anymore. Not in the same way as before, anyway. Nor do I desire to devote my life to something that here had nearly destroyed me. I am free now, and yet never free. That which goes on—is it Dinky hooves at all, or somepony new? This is a question I never would have considered without the perspective it brought me. I would have never seen what I was missing, or what I had to gain—or lose.
And so, I carry on. I leave the book behind, and yet I carry its contents onward. Within me, in whatever strange form they have chosen to take. Though I surely fail here in this project, I proceed forward considering this, overall, a success.



As the essay concluded, Cheerilee suddenly shivered and turned to her right with a cry of surprise. She looked around the room, her heart beating quickly, realizing that she was sweating despite how strangely cold the schoolhouse felt.
For just the briefest moment, she had thought that she felt the presence of a pony beside her. She had even been convinced that she could feel her breath on her neck, and smell some kind of strange and horrid decomposition. When she had turned, her panic had only peaked as she just briefly had convinced herself that she saw a flash of yellow and red.
Looking around the schoolhouse, though, Cheerilee found it empty and lit only by the now setting sun. She realized that she had been there far longer than she had expected, as indicated by the strange silence. There was no sound of children playing, as they had all gone home long ago. The only noise was the slow creaking of the chains on the swingset outside.
Cheerilee stood up, quickly packing her things. Although she worked in the schoolhouse every day, it was a far less cheerful place at night. She wanted to get home as quickly as possible and curl up in a warm blanket, perhaps with Big Macintosh if he was available.
As she left, though, she paused. For a moment, she found herself extremely annoyed that a student had in their haste tracked water into the schoolhouse. Only after staring at the hoofprints, though, did Cheerilee realize that they were far too large to belong to any of her students, and that rather than entering the room they appeared to start in the middle and progress outward toward the door, tracking dirty brown water where their owner had passed as she left.

Time passed. The schoolyear eventually came to a close, and the final report cards were mailed to the homes of the various students. Dinky already knew her grade long before it arrived, though, due to her detailed recordkeeping. Due to a combination of her low grade in hoofwriting, having missed over a month of school, and her failing grade on her book report, she barely passed the semester with a C.
Derpy, of course, was as proud as ever; in her own days, C’s had been a completely unattainable goal. Dinky, however, remained curiously ambivalent. With a grade so low, her chances of entering Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns had been completely torpedoed. No that it mattered, though. She had stopped applying, and no longer had much desire to attend. After what the book had done to her, she was not sure she was ready to delve into arcane secrets, or that she ever would be.
Finding herself free from forcing herself to study, though, had an unusual effect on Dinky. Where normally she would have spent the summer in deep studying for fourteen hours a day, she instead found herself outside. Sometimes she sat alone, contemplating the world around her, and sometimes she even spoke to the other ponies of Ponyville, although then only rarely except to Silver Spoon.
There were even a few times she went on picknicks with her mother, and for the first time in a long time she remembered what she had been missing. She had enjoyed them so much when she had been younger, but had swept them away in favor of ever more intense learning. Now, though, she seemed to spend far more time teaching. Even at the picnics she would often find herself keeping true to her word and attempting to teach her mother to read.
It was a difficult task indeed, but Derpy was showing some progress. Dinky had cycled through several different forms of scripts, and found that Derpy had better luck with Old Equestrian characters and excellent progress with proto-Assyrian symmetric glyphs. That, of course, was quite surprising to Dinky, especially considering how the subtlety of the characters had taken her many months to be able to learn while her mother seemed to gain an intuitive understanding of them in less than a week.
Another strange effect that Dinky noticed was the increasing amount of time she spent around Starlight. She got the impression that the two of them had shared something, if it had even only been second-hoof, although she was not really sure what it had been. Starlight seemed impressed with Dinky, and Dinky impressed with the older unicorn even more so. Dinky had at first started helping Starlight in the library, but after several weeks Starlight began to offer her tips on spellwork until finally she was outright teaching Dinky how to properly use magic. Dinky had been hesitant about this at first, but she trusted that Starlight was both knowledgeable and powerful enough to keep her out of danger from things like the book.
As for the book itself, Dinky had kept it. It was simply too dangerous to return to the library. Dinky knew that there was a good chance that it might easily retire to the shelves of the Far Edge, where it could go dormant for years, or even decades, and that anypony who picked it up might not even find anything unusual about it at all. There was a chance, though, that it would not stay so quiet, and that in time its text would be rediscovered and its story read once more.
The book now resided on a high shelf in Dinky’s house. Derpy had placed it there, ostensibly out of Dinky’s reach. She did not realize, of course, that as a unicorn Dinky had a rather long magical reach. Pulling the book out of the shelf was a trivial matter for her.
And she did, from time to time. Dinky quickly realized, though, that Cheerilee had been correct. The book was blank, and perhaps had been all along. She would sometimes take it down and flip through the pages, finding each one empty, save for the occasional isolated word that seemed to have slithered out of where the others had gone, sitting hauntingly at an oblique angle on the corner of a page or close to the cleft near where the pages bent and collapsed into the book’s spine. Those words were often strange, and though Dinky could not recall what they said, reading even them left a strange feeling lingering within her mind.
Then, sometimes, very rarely, it was different. On the coldest and most frigid winter nights when the world was silent and Dinky found herself utterly alone, she would sometimes reach for the book. In the dim of the snow-reflected moonlight, she would open the pages, and on one occasion she had to her everlasting surprise and dread found the pages once again full with a story that she knew well and yet could never know.
Even on those days, though, Dinky did not have the heart to read what was written there. Not yet, and not until her mother was ready. She would pause, looking long into the book and wondering what it said, perhaps flipping through it- -but never to the final page. The one part of the book that had never faded was what was written on the card in the back: Dinky’s own name, and that of another that she dared not witness again in her mortal life.
Then, in time, she would replace the book back in its seat on the high shelf, where it was safe and others safe from it. At those times, Dinky would feel profoundly lonely, knowing that the burden was hers and hers alone for the time being. Then, almost always, she would turn toward the window and wonder if just for a moment she did not catch a glimpse of undulating, reflective water beyond the frozen hills. In the distance, she would hear the quiet slop of the dark water, and she would smell the decay and salt air.
It was out there, after all. Just as the book remained, so did the lake. It was never gone, and it would never dry. It would simply wait, quietly obscuring its deaths and those within- -until the day that Dinky would finally decide to wade into its waters once more, and finally return.